Steven Rabinowitz

Wednesday night I sat in row 9 with my two boys and watched the Maccabiah open in Jerusalem. If you've never heard of it, think Jewish Olympics. Every four years Jewish athletes from all over the world fly to Israel to compete, tens of thousands packed into the stadium. It's one of the biggest gatherings of the Jewish world there is. I spent a lot of the night counting flags, because a lot of them weren't there. Austria sent one athlete. One. Belgium barely more. Australia normally sends one of the biggest teams in the whole thing and this year basically didn't come. Their delegation was around 300 athletes who'd trained two years. They pulled out. The reason surprised me, and I want to get it right. No government banned anyone from flying to Israel. What a bunch of Western governments did was put their travel warning at the top level, "do not travel." That sounds like just advice. It's not. It voids your travel insurance, and with no insurance a national team legally can't fly. No cover, no team. So nobody was forbidden. The paperwork handled it. And they cut the kids first. Britain, Canada and South Africa pulled their youth teams before anything else. The same thing is happening to Jewish teen trips to Israel across the board right now, all on the same insurance logic. Those trips are how a kid in Manchester or Melbourne actually gets tied to Israel and to the rest of the Jewish world. You cancel the trip, you don't lose a summer. You lose the kid. The first time these games were held after the Holocaust, in 1950, the stadium was full of empty spaces too. Most of European Jewry had been murdered. The survivors were stuck behind the Iron Curtain, banned by their own governments from coming. You could look at who marched in and basically see where the Jewish people had been wiped out and where it was growing back. I was doing that same math Wednesday. Only this time the people missing are alive, free, and would give anything to be here. A form kept them home. Somewhere in Sydney there's a Jewish dad who wanted to give his kids the exact night I just gave mine. A risk department said no. I wrote the whole thing up, including the guys who rode motorcycles from Tel Aviv across Europe in 1930 to go round up athletes for the first games, and why 1950 actually leaves me hopeful: 👇🇮🇱✡️